During the holiday season, the Château Frontenac is decked out in red and green. For an interesting effect, try taking a picture of the castle’s main tower from Côte de la Montagne. To do this, you have to point the camera upward, but all the lines that are normally vertical become slanted.
Photographic Technique
To correct this effect and restore the architectural lines to near verticality, some computer work is necessary. In a few minutes, after cropping and changing the photographic plane, the photo regains the natural appearance that the eye observes when climbing Côte de la Montagne.
The photo above shows another beautiful view of the Château Frontenac. In the middle of the tourist season, passersby in Old Quebec are plentiful in front of the camera lens. Long exposure times mean that several “ghosts” will appear to be moving around when taking nighttime photographs.
How can you avoid these “ghosts” as much as possible? Timing is important. Once the blue hour has passed, complete darkness provides uniform lighting. This allows you to choose a moment when no one is passing by the camera when taking each shot to achieve the HDR effect. Five shots with different apertures will give you the desired HDR result. I use a tripod and a Canon EF 11-24mm f/4L USM wide-angle lens mounted on a Canon 5DSR full-frame camera.
There is only one person very close to the camera lens during the entire session. I remove her from the HDR photo. Since she was working with a tripod, she moved very little during my five shots, which allowed the correction tool in the digital processing software to teleport her to a parallel universe.
Click on the link for more photos of Quebec City on my blog.
